KF Michigan Chapter Presents: Spies In My Blood – An Evening with Alex Storozynski
🕡 Time: 6:30 PM
📍 Location: The Galeria
3535 Commerce Rd.
West Bloomfield Township, MI 48324
Join KF Michigan Chapter for a special evening with Alex Storozynski, Pulitzer-winning journalist, Chairman of the Board of Trustees the Kosciuszko Foundation, and author of Spies In My Blood: Secrets of a Polish Family’s Fight Against Nazis and Communists.
Admission is free. Light refreshments will be served.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Alex Storozynski was raised by soldiers, spies, and assassins. Despite his mother’s pleas to keep their secrets, he uncovered the truth when he ventured behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.
Growing up in a family of World War II exiles in New York City, Alex and his older brother George knew that their father fought in the Allied invasion of Normandy, and that their mother was forced by the Germans to work in a Nazi slave labor camp. In 1985, after graduating from Columbia University’s Journalism School, Alex traveled to Warsaw, Poland. There, he interviewed the Communist government’s propaganda minister, Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, as well as rock stars, filmmakers, and artists. His presence drew suspicion—he was surveilled and questioned by the secret police, who labeled him an “enemy of the state.”
Back in New York, with a successful journalism career underway, Alex delved into military archives, family correspondence, and artifacts. He uncovered that in the 1930s, his paternal grandfather ran a spy ring that used chimney sweeps to gather intelligence on Russian agents involved in mass murders against Poles and Ukrainians. His father was also a spy during WWII. Additionally, Alex discovered that his maternal grandfather was a tank commander who assassinated German officers in brothels the night before battles during the Allied invasion of Italy.
When the Berlin Wall fell, easing the Soviet grip on Eastern Europe, Alex obtained secret dossiers revealing that the Communist secret police assigned him and his brother the codenames “Rocky and Nemo.” On his deathbed, George confessed that he had also been part of the family intelligence network and worked for the CIA, undertaking one of the Cold War’s most perilous missions.
This extraordinary story is detailed in the memoir, “Spies In My Blood: Secrets of a Polish Family’s Fight Against Nazis and Communists,” available on Amazon.com.
